With votes still being hand-counted,
there's every indication Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani's moderate faction has scored a
stunning victory over the extreme right in the
crucial election for the 86-member Council of
Experts, according to Iranian state TV.

"Hashemi" - as he is known in Tehran - as
well as Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi - the gray eminence
and spiritual leader of

President Mahmud Ahmadinejad -
will be among the 16 clerics representing Tehran
in the Council of Experts.

The Council of
Experts (86 clerics only; no women allowed) is key
because it's the only institution in the Islamic
Republic capable of holding the supreme leader
accountable and even removing him from office. It
is the system's Holy Grail. The supreme leader -
not the president - is where the buck stops in
Iran.

Once again, this election has been a
case of the extreme right against the
moderate/pragmatists. Or the recluse Yazdi - aka
"the crocodile" (in Farsi) - against the eternal
insider, relative "friend of the West", former
president (1989-97), opportunist and king of the
dodgy deal, Rafsanjani.

Yazdi is the dean
of the Imam Khomeini Educational and Research
Institute in Qom, a hardcore hawza
(theological school) that has prepared and
configured the world view of key members of the
Ahmadinejad presidency. It's impossible to
interview Yazdi - officially because of
"government rules", unofficially of his own
volition.

Rafsanjani, aka "the shark",
remains the chairman of the Expediency Council and
virtually the regime's No 2, behind Supreme Leader
Ali al-Khamenei and ahead of Ahmadinejad. Iranian
pop culture, with a tinge of Discovery Channel,
delighted in describing this as the battle between
the crocodile and the shark.

It was
heavily symbolic that moderate Rafsanjani and
another former president, the progressive,
sartorially impeccable Mohammad "dialogue of
civilizations" Khatami, voted together in the
Jamaran mosque, where the late ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic,
used to deliver his speeches. Iranian reformist
papers did not fail to publish the emblematic
photo sealing the alliance on their front pages
this past Saturday. Rafsanjani's victory was
sweeter because he had lost to Ahmadinejad in the
second round of the 2005 presidential elections.

There have been rumors in Tehran for
months that Yazdi and his followers were on a
power grab. They had won city and village council
elections, then parliamentary elections, and the
presidency (with Ahmadinejad), and were ready to
conquer the Council of Experts and thus be in
position to choose the next supreme leader. There
have been unconfirmed reports that Khamenei may be
seriously ill.

Saudi Wahhabis may complain
there are "no free elections in Iran" (as if there
were any elections in Saudi). Anyway, popular
participation in these, one may say, "relatively
free" elections was a healthy 60%.

Clerics
running for the Council of Experts must pass a
difficult theological exam - and must be approved
by the Council of Guardians, which, as with
anything that really matters in Iran, is
controlled by the supreme leader. The six key
mullahs out of the council's 12 jurists are
directly appointed by the supreme leader. So
inevitably the election for the Council of Experts
had to be supreme-leader-controlled. No wonder
Khamenei described it last week as the most
important in the whole country, stressing that
candidates "should comprise honest, wise,
competent, benevolent and trustworthy people".
Given the election results, the Council of Experts
is expected to remain under the ironclad dominance
of Khamenei's conservative bloc.

On
municipal elections nationwide, the extreme right
- clustered on Ahmadinejad-endorsed lists - also
fared worse than expected. The results for the
crucial Tehran City Council will only be known
next week, but certainly there won't be a sweep by
the extreme right - rather a surge by the
reformists mixed with Ahmadinejad-faction allies
plus a coterie of technocratic conservatives.

What the crocodile has been up to
Yazdi and his followers have always
stressed they want to implement "real Islam". They
view the Rafsanjani camp as a bunch of filthy
rich, morally and legally corrupt decadents,
totally oblivious to the concerns of "ordinary
people", whose self-styled key symbol happens to
be Ahmadinejad.

Yazdi is also the
spiritual mentor of the Hojjatieh, a sort of
ultra-fundamentalist sect whose literal
interpretation of Shi'ite tradition holds that
chaos in mankind is a necessary precondition for
the imminent arrival of the Mahdi - the 12th
hidden (since AD 941) Shi'ite imam who will come
to save the world from injustice and widespread
corruption. Ahmadinejad may not be a Hojjatieh
himself, but he understands where they are coming
from.

Yazdi's "real Islam" has nothing to
do with Western democracy. He wants a
kelafat - a caliphate. Ayatollahs like
Yazdi are simply not concerned with worldly
matters, foreign policy, geopolitical games or
Iran's nuclear program; the only thing that
matters is